A Journey Into Minimalism.

Day 3: Minimizing the Digital Clutter.

Preach, Bernie! As you can see Bernie is about to go on a stump speech about Amazon’s lightning deals and how the 1% send you 99% of the emails in your inbox. That probably has a grain of truth to it.

Enough About The Emails!

Today I took on the task of trying to cut down on stuff that clouds and litters my digital landscape. I thought the best way to do this would be to start with the first and largest source of clutter I could think of: my personal email inbox. This is like ground zero of the digital bombardment I’ve opted in for over the past decade: Facebook notifications, eBay, PayPal, Target, Best Buy, Ticketmaster, Amazon, political campaigns, causes, various banks, insurance, and other service providers. The list goes on. I couldn’t believe how many there were that I either knowingly or unknowingly had opted myself into.

When I first sat down for this task, I had around 2000+ emails in my personal inbox. It was several gigabytes worth. This included a mixture of personal, social, and promotional emails. I use gmail, which divided most, but not all things into a primary, social, and promotions tabs. Reflecting now, I don’t know why I didn’t do this sooner. I’ve honestly felt that some of these retailers emailed me almost on a daily basis, reminding me of deals I shouldn’t pass up, things left in my cart, or the performers that were going to be in my area. Not only does it prevent me from searching through my inbox in an efficient manner, it also clogs up my phone by what gets pushed to it. So here’s my inbox after an hour or two of my time…

Pristine. It’s bringing me a gentle, calming, peace.

What are your Initial thoughts? I think this is a good start. There’s been a few that slipped through the cracks, even a day after, as if some have a delay in removing me from the mailing list. Or they’re a virulent strain of flu that’s hard to immunize. I didn’t realize that Facebook sends you an email for virtually anything that happens to you by default. That’s far too much. Zero seems enough. I’m curious how I’ll continue to feel without the constant email reminders about what I should be consuming. I doubt I’ll even notice.

I also started sorting through the inbox labels I have, and what’s visible, to start some streamlining there. After that, I did some bookmark trimming in my browser, removing things I haven’t used and are no longer relevant or applicable. These few things helped think this was a worthwhile effort and I think there’s some trimming I can do in my computer drives at work and on my home computer that I can also minimize. After some first steps, I’m going to explore more of the 25 areas of digital clutter to minimalize, and some other web resources and report back later with results, observations, and sentiments.